Environmental Health Perspectives

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Articles from Vol. 114, No. 10, October

A Backpack's Worth of Data: Elevated Teen Cancer Risks Linked to Air Pollution

It is difficult to assess the cancer risks associated with exposures to air pollutants because much of the health focus has been on the major outdoor pollutants; far less is known about exposures inside homes and buildings, where pollutants may be...

A Cancer Risk Assessment of Inner-City Teenagers Living in New York City and Los Angeles

BACKGROUND: The Toxics Exposure Assessment Columbia-Harvard (TEACH) project assessed exposures and cancer risks from urban air pollutants in a population of high school teenagers in New York City (NYC) and Los Angeles (LA). Forty-six high school students...

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVE: Endocrine parameters have proven useful in the detection of early or low-level responses to pollutants. Although most of the studies on endocrine modulation have been focused on processes involving gonadal steroids, contaminants...

Age- and Concentration-Dependent Elimination Half-Life of 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-P-Dioxin in Seveso Children

OBJECTIVE: Pharmacokinetic and statistical analyses are reported to elucidate key variables affecting 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) elimination in children and adolescents. DESIGN: We used blood concentrations to calculate TCDD elimination...

INTRODUCTION: We assessed the relationship between hypospadias and proximity to agricultural pesticide applications using a GIS-based exposure method. METHODS: We obtained information for 354 cases of hypospadias born between 1998 and 2002 in eastern...

An Exploration of Ethical Issues in Research in Children's Health and the Environment

The consideration of ethical issues relating to pediatric environmental health is a recent phenomenon. Discussions of biomedical ethics, research on children, and environmental health research have a longer history. In the late 1990s, researchers at...

It is human nature to remain committed to endeavors in which one feels personally invested. For the parents and children involved in studies at the Mount Sinai Center for Children's Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research, most of whom...

Blood Lead Levels and Death from All Causes, Cardiovascular Disease, and Cancer: Results from the NHANES III Mortality Study

BACKGROUND: Analyses of mortality data for participants examined in 1976-1980 in the second National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES II) suggested an increased risk of mortality at blood lead levels &gt; 20 [micro]g/dL. Blood lead levels...

The NIEHS Strategic Plan for 2006-2011, New Frontiers in Environmental Sciences and Human Health, lays out a vision for establishing a global effort in the environmental health sciences. A central component of that vision is the establishment of enhanced...

Cancer Incidence among Pesticide Applicators Exposed to Dicamba in the Agricultural Health Study

BACKGROUND: Dicamba is an herbicide commonly applied to crops in the United States and abroad. We evaluated cancer incidence among pesticide applicators exposed to dicamba in the Agricultural Health Study, a prospective cohort of licensed pesticide...

It is a simple fact that young children are those most likely to die during humanitarian crises caused by famine, war, and natural disasters. Relief agencies are keenly aware of this and do their utmost to save as many young lives as possible as well...

Children Show Highest Levels of Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers in a California Family of Four: A Case Study

Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), a major class of flame retardants, are ubiquitous environmental contaminants with particularly high concentrations in humans from the United States. This study is a first attempt to report and compare PBDE concentrations...

Chlorinated Pool Attendance, Atopy, and the Risk of Asthma during Childhood

The pool chlorine hypothesis postulates that the rise in childhood asthma in the developed world could result at least partly from the increasing exposure of children to toxic gases and aerosols contaminating the air of indoor chlorinated pools. To...

Many environmental exposures have been confirmed to affect children's respiratory health, but few have been studied in very young children. Now NIEHS grantees Grace K. LeMasters, Jocelyn M. Biagini, and their colleagues at the University of Cincinnati...

Histology, the study of how cells are organized into tissue, is a keystone of the biological sciences. For decades, histologists have depended upon methods such as the tried-and-true slides of stained tissue sections. Although much has been learned...

Dietary folic acid supplementation in women of childbearing age has been a major public health success story, reducing the incidence of neural tube defects (NTDs) by an estimated 50-70%. The CDC currently recommends that all women of childbearing age...

More than 22,000 people came together in the late summer of 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development. According to Using Indicators to Measure Progress on Children's Environmental Health: A Call to Action,...

A year ago Hurricane Katrina tore through the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana and Mississippi, leaving devastation in its wake--whole communities ripped from their foundations, the displacement of thousands of people from their homes, and a flood of...

Children's health was the focus of almost 30 different sessions at the International Conference on Environmental Epidemiology and Exposure, held 2-6 September 2006 in Paris. Exposure to environmental toxicants early in life, and even parental exposure...

BACKGROUND: We expanded an existing cohort of workers (n = 2,588) considered highly exposed to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) at two capacitor manufacturing plants to include all workers with at least 90 days of potential PCB exposure during 1939-1977...

OBJECTIVES: N-nitroso compounds, endogenously formed from nitrate-derived nitrite, are suspected to be important bladder carcinogens. However, the association between nitrate exposure from food or drinking water and bladder cancer has not been substantially...

Questions about the safety of the plasticizer di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), particularly in regards to exposure during medical procedures such as transfusions, have swirled for decades, but especially in the last several years, given growing concerns...

The importance of "judicious use of language in regard to public communication of pesticide health risks" (Lu et al. 2006b) is clearly recognized and acknowledged in recent letters from Avery (2006) and Lu et al. (2006b). Their correspondence concerned...

Organophosphate Insecticides Target the Serotonergic System in Developing Rat Brain Regions: Disparate Effects of Diazinon and Parathion at Doses Spanning the Threshold for Cholinesterase Inhibition

BACKGROUND: In the developing brain, serotonin (5HT) systems are among the most sensitive to disruption by organophosphates. OBJECTIVES: We exposed neonatal rats to daily doses of diazinon or parathion on postnatal days (PND)1-4 and evaluated 5HT...

Ozone's Impact on Public Health: Contributions from Indoor Exposures to Ozone and Products of Ozone-Initiated Chemistry

OBJECTIVE: The associations between ozone concentrations measured outdoors and both morbidity and mortality may be partially due to indoor exposures to ozone and ozone-initiated oxidation products. In this article I examine the contributions of such...

Persistence of Symptoms in Veterans of the First Gulf War: 5-Year Follow-Up

BACKGROUND: During the 1990-1991 Gulf War, approximately 700,000 U.S. troops were deployed to the Persian Gulf theater of operations. Of that number, approximately 100,000 have presented medical complaints through various registry and examination programs....

Polybrominated Diphenyl Ether (PBDE) Levels in an Expanded Market Basket Survey of U.S. Food and Estimated PBDE Dietary Intake by Age and Sex

OBJECTIVES: Our objectives in this study were to expand a previously reported U.S. market basket survey using a larger sample size and to estimate levels of PBDE intake from food for the U.S. general population by sex and age. METHODS: We measured...

Power, Justice, and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement

Edited by David Naguib Pellow and Robert J. Brulle Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 2005. 339 pp. ISBN: 0-262-16233-4, $25 Over the past 18 years, hundreds of books have been published on the environmental justice movement (EJM); however, this is one...

The pressing need for empirically informed public policies aimed at understanding and promoting children's health has challenged environmental scientists to modify traditional research paradigms and reevaluate their roles and obligations toward research...

BACKGROUND: In pediatric environmental health research, information about family members is often directly sought or indirectly obtained in the process of identifying child risk factors and helping to tease apart and identify interactions between genetic...

We read with great interest the article by de Burbure et al. (2006) on health effects in children who live near nonferrous smelters in France, the Czech Republic, and Poland. We were especially interested in the inverse relationship found between levels...

Prolactin Changes as a Consequence of Chemical Exposure: De Burbure and Bernard Respond

We appreciate the letter from Alessio and Lucchini concerning the number and variety of toxicants able to affect serum prolactin levels. Reflecting on the wide variability of the currently available data, we would like to make two additional points....

INTRODUCTION: The association between exposure to extremely low-frequency electric and magnetic fields (ELF) and childhood leukemia has led to the classification of magnetic fields by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a "possible human...

Reduction in Asthma Morbidity in Children as a Result of Home Remediation Aimed at Moisture Sources

OBJECTIVE: Home dampness and the presence of mold and allergens have been associated with asthma morbidity. We examined changes in asthma morbidity in children as a result of home remediation aimed at moisture sources. DESIGN: In this prospective,...

When the EPA announced on 3 August 2006 that it had completed a 10-year review of U.S. pesticide safety, the agency issued a statement full of optimism from administrator Stephen L. Johnson: "By maintaining the highest ethical and scientific standards...

Saxitoxin Puffer Fish Poisoning in the United States, with the First Report of Pyrodinium Bahamense as the Putative Toxin Source

BACKGROUND: From January 2002 to May 2004, 28 puffer fish poisoning (PFP) cases in Florida, New Jersey, Virginia, and New York were linked to the Indian River Lagoon (IRL) in Florida. Saxitoxins (STXs) of unknown source were first identified in fillet...

Social Ecology of Children's Vulnerability to Environmental Pollutants

BACKGROUND: The outcomes of exposure to neurotoxic chemicals early in life depend on the properties of both the chemical and the host's environment. When our questions focus on the toxicant, the environmental properties tend to be regarded as marginal...

Numerous publications and reports have expressed health and safety concerns about the production and use of nanoparticles, especially in areas of exposure monitoring, personal use, and environmental fate and transport. We suggest that stable isotopic...

Environmental health science is getting short shrift in some K-12 schools, according to an analysis in the May 2006 Journal of Geoscience Education. Students in some states "study the air, water, rocks, plants, and animals, but don't study any object...

Supplementing the Traditional Institutional Review Board with an Environmental Health and Community Review Board

BACKGROUND: Community-based research often involves additional ethical, legal, and social considerations beyond those of the specific individuals involved in the study. The traditional institutional review board (IRB) typically focuses on protecting...

Atopic asthma (inflammation of the airways caused by exposure to airborne allergens) has become increasingly prevalent since the 1960s and is now the most common chronic childhood disease in the United States and many other industrialized countries....

The Economic Impact of Early Life Environmental Tobacco Smoke Exposure: Early Intervention for Developmental Delay

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Early-life exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) can result in developmental delay as well as childhood asthma and increased risk of cancer. The high cost of childhood asthma related to ETS exposure has been widely...

When it comes to allergies, not all fungi are created equal, according to a study by University of Cincinnati researchers published in the September 2006 issue of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology. Exposure to certain fungal spores can make children...

The Politics of Risk: A Human Rights Paradigm for Children's Environmental Health Research

A human rights paradigm for environmental health research makes explicit the relationship between poor health and poverty, inequality, and social and political marginalization, and it aims at civic problem solving. In so doing, it incorporates support...

This Little PBDE Went to Market: Estimating Intake from Grocery Store Foods

High concentrations of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) found in the U.S. population are a cause for concern because of these compounds' similarity to polychlorinated biphenyls. Unlike the latter, which have recently decreased in blood levels,...

Pregnant women are famously exhorted to faithfully take their daily prenatal vitamins, which often contain iron and other minerals. But new research suggests that a weekly iron supplement coinciding with the renewal of the small intestine's mucosal...

Trials and Tribulations of Protecting Children from Environmental Hazards

Society is increasingly aware of the profound impact that the environment has on children's health. Not surprisingly, there is increasing public scrutiny about children's exposures to environmental hazards, especially for disadvantaged children. These...